Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Wi-Fi inventor

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood's golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actresses of all time.


2 comments:

ba.ldei.aga said...

Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she tinkered in her spare time on various hobbies and ideas, which included a traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.

During World War II, Lamarr read that radio-controlled torpedoes had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo's guidance system and set it off course. When discussing this with her friend the composer and pianist George Antheil, the idea was raised that a frequency-hopping signal might prevent the torpedo's radio guidance system from being tracked or jammed. Antheil succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player piano mechanism with radio signals. Antheil sketched-out the idea for the frequency-hopping system, which was to use a perforated paper tape which actuated pneumatic controls (as was already used in player pianos). Antheil was introduced to Samuel Stuart Mackeown, a professor of radio-electrical engineering at Caltech, whom Lamarr then employed for a year to actually develop the functionality of the idea. Lamarr also hired the Los Angeles legal firm of Lyon & Lyon to search for prior knowledge, and to craft the application for the patent which was granted under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

However, neither the US Navy nor that of any other nation were using radio-controlled torpedoes at the time, and electro-mechanical devices such as these were soon to be made obsolete by purely electronic controls. Furthermore, spread-spectrum frequency-hopping was not a new idea: as early as 1899, Guglielmo Marconi had experimented with frequency-selective reception in an attempt to minimize radio interference, Nikola Tesla had written extensively about it in the first quarter of the 20th century, in 1929 the Polish engineer and inventor Leonard Danilewicz further elaborated on the idea, and in 1932 US Patent #1869659A was issued to the Dutch inventor, William Broertjes for his electromechanical device to encrypt radio transmissions by using frequency-hopping.

Although the U.S. Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

ba.ldei.aga said...

похоже Wi-Fi изобрела не она :(